Youth and energy? I suppressed a laugh. “Maybe I knew I was too inexperienced. No woman wants to be a man’s first time.”
Altair and Icarus cursed softly. Thorn tilted his head, seeking another answer. “What about your first rut? Didn’t you take a Beta woman to ease it?”
“Or twelve,” Altair murmured.
I shrugged. “In Starlak, Alpha males are not allowed to be near women in our first rut. We’re chained, kept alone until it passes. Mine came early when I was seventeen. It was ten days before I was unchained.”
“That’s awful,” Icarus said. He wasn’t wrong; it was almost a form of torture. When a rut was denied, it lasted far longer than normal. “Why?”
“Our warlord ordered it decades ago. Too many young Alphas were losing control of themselves in the rut. Killing the Beta women, unable to stop…” I gritted my teeth, and looked up, seeing comprehension in their gazes. “Afterward, they weren’t repentant. They had been driven mad. Many became rapists, killers. Pedophiles, even, attacking children. Now, if an Alpha shows signs of that madness at the end of his rut, his father or closest male relative is given the task of killing him.”
I tried to smile. “My own father feared I would succumb to the madness. I am much weaker than most of our warriors, and smaller.” They all made sounds of disbelief. “It’s true. At the end of my rut, I returned to my room and found my father had ordered my possessions to be packed away already, assuming I would have to be put down.”
Thorn’s hand on my arm made me realize I was trembling with remembered rage. “My own father,” he said, lifting a hand to his face and outlining the long silver scar there, “was an Alpha gone insane. He attacked me when I was a child and took a knife to my face, trying to carve out my eyes after I witnessed him raping a Beta woman to death.”
The room went utterly still.
“I became an assassin so that I could stand against men like him. And be strong enough, deadly enough, to protect myself, and young boys and girls who find themselves in the hands of evil men.”
“Like Roya,” I whispered. He nodded. Our eyes met, and something changed in his gaze.
His eyes were filled with approval when he asked, “You still haven’t answered my question. Why did you tell Roya no?”
I thought it was obvious. “Thorn, don’t you understand? You’re her primary consort. Her heart is yours. I would never usurp that position, never presume to step into your shoes, even if she would have me. She’s approaching her first heat; all the signs are there. Goddess, she’s already begun opening. When she builds her nest, you will be the first to enter, and the first to claim her. It’s the Goddess’s will.”
Thorn shocked us all when he spoke. “Kavin, next time? Go ahead. Build the nest, bite her first.” His teeth were clenched so hard, I thought his jaw might break. “I swear on the Goddess’s name, I will never mate her. I can’t.”
ROYA
Icouldn’t stay mad at Kavin and the others for long. Not when I was free for the first time in my life. Free to do what I wanted on the island, free to sleep and eat and explore when the mood struck. The three days we had been planning to stay stretched into a week, but none of us complained. It was paradise.
The sounds of the island woke me: wild birds calling from the jungle’s interior, chattering monkeys, and the rustling of larger animals traveling to and from the freshwater spring near the center of the island. I rose early each morning in my hut, feeling only the slightest bit guilty that I had it to myself, while the others shared with Thorn or slept in hammocks slung between palms. After a breakfast of coconut or ripe papaya, I went with one or more of the Alphas to gather water or more fruit, or to check the crab traps Icarus’s men had set out.
On the way to the spring, I also made sure to grab any leaves, stems, and berries I found familiar to take back to Thorn so he could positively identify them. I had enough poison in my cloak to kill a hundred men, but it never hurt to find more, and to gather the sorts of plants that made decent medicines and antidotes as well.
Kavin and Altair were with me today as I hunted for some mushrooms that looked like a powerful hallucinogenic variety we had grown near the Guild camp. In small amounts, it was effective pain relief. In larger doses, you could convince a man he was a seagull and send him sailing off a cliff.
Altair watched as I broke off a few stems of something I thought might be an analgesic herb. “Have you always been interested in plants, Roya?”
I nodded. “Years before Thorn started training me. I loved the idea that even though I was young, and smaller than the men who had power over me and my sisters, if I learned enough, I would be the one to fear.”
“And once Thorn began your training?”
I laughed out loud, startling a flock of bright yellow and orange birds into the air. “Sometimes I think he regretted teaching me all he did, but he didn’t have much choice. I harassed my other instructor until Thorn took me on as an apprentice of sorts, rather than let me be thrown out of the Guild.” I tucked away the herbs I’d gathered, remembering how I had challenged the regular Poisons instructor, a Beta named Turner. When he had mixed up two common sedative herbs, and I corrected him in front of the class, he’d thrown me out… and into Thorn’s workshop.
“These are some of the deadliest poisons we know,” Thorn said, leaning over my worktable, examining the ingredients I had laid out. “Be glad Turner isn’t teaching you this; you’d probably end up dead.”
Thorn’s cloak covered most of his face, but the sharp point of his chin, with the smallest edge of the silvered scar, was visible. I had only been at the assassin’s training camp for a month, but it had been the hardest month of my life.
The hardest, and most rewarding. In the harem, I had been forced to wait and wonder what might happen to me next, or to my friends. Which of us would be taken and abused, and returned… or worse.
Here, the others might hate me, the boys might play tricks on me, trip me, throw my food in the dirt. But I was allowed to retaliate. And they were giving me weapons that were more effective than any I had been allowed before.
Poisons.
Being his student was no hardship for me, even if the others mocked me for getting thrown out of Turner’s course. Thorn was soft-spoken, and smelled of leather and almonds, better than any man I’d ever been near. I leaned ever so slightly forward and took a breath, wondering what it was that made him smell so good.
“Are you paying attention, Roya?” His voice snapped me out of the slight haze that had taken me.
